Lynchburg museum retraces origins of black education in Virginia

The son of slaves, Kelso proposed at Virginia's 1867 Constitutional Convention the novel concept of public schools for everyone, blacks and whites. Educating the masses -- especially recently freed slaves -- was no small idea in Virginia at the time: A generation before, reading and writing were occupations reserved for rich whites. Slaves who dared turn the pages of a book sometimes had their fingers cut off.

The struggle and sacrifice for literacy among blacks in the South is a story that Lynchburg's Legacy Museum will detail in a series of exhibits starting June 24.

''We want people to understand the legacy of this unequal past,'' said Carolyn W. Bell, who is overseeing the exhibit. ''Today, there are increasing numbers of African-Americans in business or government. But for so long, they lagged behind. Sometimes, the only education available to African-Americans was a vocational education.''

For about a year, museum volunteers searched through closets and attics of friends and neighbors, looking for artifacts from the days of segregation.

They came back with yellowed school clothes, geography books made from cardboard, and a dusty leather-bound Bible, the kind from which blacks learned to read. From local libraries, they found snapshots of barefoot children of various ages, crammed on benches in a schoolhouse. Altogether, the volunteers compiled enough material for two years of exhibits, Bell said.

And then there was Kelso. He was known to have taught at a private freedman's school on Twelfth Street. But despite his contribution, Kelso remains relatively unknown in the town where he taught so many children. None of the volunteers could find pictures of the local teacher or the families who claimed him as a descendant.

Samuel L. Horst, a professor emeritus of American history at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, also had difficulty learning about Kelso. While working on his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia and later on a history book about black schools, Horst could find little more than brief anecdotes about him in the diary of Jacob Yoder, Kelso's friend and fellow educator.

''I'm pretty sure he was self-taught,'' said Horst, thumbing through notes he compiled from the national archives in Washington. ''And at school there's mention that he had a band.''

Kelso was also appointed to the Virginia Constitutional Convention after the Civil War. On Dec. 14, 1867, he asked that Virginia create and support a school system ''which shall give to all classes a free and equal participation in all its benefits.''

''It was an attempt to make legal what never was allowed before,'' said Peter Wallenstein, a professor of Southern history at Virginia Tech. ''This really was an amazing transition, and one that happened in a very short period of time.''

Virginia had previously outlawed teaching slaves to read. Those who were caught were whipped or had their fingers cut off, Bell said. Still, Wallenstein estimates that one in 20 slaves had learned to read by the end of the Civil War.

Slaves had known the benefits of being able to read and write. Literacy held the promise of turning farmers into doctors, lawyers, politicians. It allowed them to keep records, to understand contracts.

''There probably was also a realization among slaves that 'boy, there must be something to this reading stuff if they don't want us to have it,''' Wallenstein said.

The idea of basic literacy for everyone was imported by the Yankee teachers who followed the liberating armies of the North, founding ''freedmen's'' schools for former slaves. During the late 1860s, public schools became a pressing issue everywhere in the South, Wallenstein said. By 1870, just about every state had one.

The Legacy Museum's exhibit, ''Struggle, Sacrifice, and Scholarship: Black Education in Central Virginia, 1800-1922,'' covers this revolutionary time, including the development of vocational education for blacks, segregation, and the role of the black church and northern philanthropy in black education.

A sequel exhibit planned for June 2002 will discuss integration and the quest for equality in education from 1923 to 1970.

Among the displays of old books and photographs, there will be the remains of Kelso's story, which many in Lynchburg will hear for the first time.

''This is a story that needs to be told,'' said Gloria Franklin, a Lynchburg resident who volunteered to help compile information for the exhibit. ''A lot of black people think they don't have a history, but they do.''

This article published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Sunday, June 24, 2001.